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The ‘Devil’s Excrement’

Venezuela imports two-thirds of its sugar. The shortage of toilet paper is blithely reported as a sign that people are eating more.

By

Roger Lowenstein

Nov. 3, 2016 7:28 p.m. ET

Venezuela should perhaps be on the minds of American voters. Even in the country’s salad days in the late 1970s, its democracy was hardly perfect. Parties were self-interested, politicians were corrupt, progress was halting (or worse). Then in 1998, voters elected a populist strongman, Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez, who promised to clean house and purge the political establishment. In the intervening years, Chávez, who died in 2013, and his equally inept and tyrannical successor, Nicolás Maduro, have pulled the plug on Venezuelan democracy, civil order and property rights, and (did I forget to mention?) fathered runaway...